Journal: Heads Will Roll (Deckchairs Will Be Re-Arranged)

Heads set to roll as Obama goes on attack over security failures that allowed Christmas Day bomber on to plane

A senior aide said Obama would seek accountability at the highest levels for the failure, a remark some observers took to mean that heads would roll.

The terrorist plot to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 exposed a near-catastrophic failure at every level of our government,’ the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said in a statement.

Phi Beta Iota: This would be a good time for President Barack Obama, President in name only, to either be the President and introduce the Electoral Reform Act of 2010, or to resign in ackinowledgement of the fact that he simiply is not up to the job because we live in a two-party tyranny that makes decisions on the basis of nakedly amoral partisan interests, not the public interest. If he also introduced the Smart Nation – Safe Nation Act, with a nod of respect to Congressman Rob Simmons, then (R-CT-02) and today the challenger to Wall Street fixer Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), he would instantly restore the integrity of the Constitution, the Republic, and the US Government.

We do not lack for knowledge of what to do. HUNDREDS of authorities are on record with good ideas that have not been implemented (e.g. the Aspin-Brown Commission). We lack for INTEGRITY in acknowledging reality and getting a grip on all that we need to do that is markedly different from the past.

We predict that President Obama will do something really stupid, such as fire Blair (who is non-partisan) and promote partisan Panetta to his maximum level of incompetence, while ignoring the reality, as we pointed out in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), that firing the engineer does not change the train built to run on a single track between Moscow and DC into what we really need–10,000 open source bicyles, 1,000 open source motorcycles, and 100 assorted small-size secret cars, most of them with multinational passengers. What is new is that Homeland Security was built on the old train model, and is just as useless. The USA today is on the cusp of a historic era where we can stick with the simple-minded Weberian stove-pipes of the past, Epoch A command & control “central planning,” or we can ride the wave and embrace bottom-up Epoch B collective intelligence and distributed resilience. From where we sit, no one in Congress or the White House reads or thinks–they are all on auto-pilot, and their definition of progress is to take that next step over the cliff.